500 Response on Robots.txt Fetch Can Impact Rich Results - Search Engine Journal

500 response to a robots.txt fetch causes loss of rich results and while a bug in search console fails to diagnose the issue

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Google’s John Mueller received feedback about a bug in how Search Console validates rich results. Google will drop images from rich results because of an error in how a CDN that hosts the images handles a request for a non-existent robots.txt. The bug that was discovered was in how search console and Google’s rich results test will fail to alert the publisher of the error and subsequently give the structured data a successful validation.

A bug in the context of programming is when a software program behaves in an unexpected manner. A bug isn’t always a problem in the coding but as in this case, it could be a failure to anticipate an issue which in turn leads to unintended results, like this one.

The publisher asking the question tried to use Google’s tools to diagnose the reason why their rich results were disappearing and was surprised to find that they were of no use for this particular error.

While this issue was affecting the recipe rich results image preview in Google’s recipe rich results, this problem could also be an issue for other situations as well.

So it’s good to be aware of this problem as it might surface in other ways.

Recipe Rich Results Image Previews...

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